Social Cognition
Over the next few days we’ll focus on social
cognition and self justification.
Tonight: overview of concepts
election-related social cognition
Thursday: film analysis – Capturing the
Friedmans
Tuesday: article seminar and self
justification
Making sense of the
world
People are constantly trying to make
sense of our social world
 Our brains are powerful and efficient, but
imperfect
 We try to be rational, but we aren’t always

Cognitive misers
We try to conserve our cognitive energy
 We adopt strategies to simplify complex
problems
 We ignore some information to reduce our
cognitive load
 This leads to biases in our thinking
**How do you try to simplify the information
related to the election?**

A few ads to get you thinking…
http://www.yeson1098.com/videos.html
 http://www.defeat1098.com/media/video
 http://www.pattymurray.com/multimedia/vi
deo?id=0023
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V66tq1
Rmdd4

Effects of Context on Social
Judgment

Reference points and contrast effects


Priming


Gain or loss? Positive or negative?
Ordering


What are we thinking about?
Framing


Good compared to what?
Primacy effect and impression formation
Amount of information

Dilution effect
Judgmental heuristics
(definition)
A mental shortcut
 Simple rules that guide our judgment and
problem solving

When do we use heuristics?
When we don’t have time to think
carefully
 When we are overloaded with
information
 When the issues at stake aren’t very
important
 When we have insufficient information
to use in making a decision

Judgmental heuristics
Representative heuristic – it’s like this in
one way, must be like it in other ways
 Availability heuristic – specific examples
come easily to mind
 Attitude heuristic – our positive or negative
attitudes affect our judgment

Halo effect –
 False consensus

Availability heuristic
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/monjuly-15-2002/i-know-what-you-did-lastsummer-of-the-shark
Stereotyping and Categorization
Self-fulfilling prophecy: Our stereotypes
lead us to treat people in ways that make
them conform to expectations
 Illusory Correlation: we see a relationship
we expect but where none exists
 Ingroup/outgroup effects: all of them are
the same and my group is better

Human cognition
is conservative
We try to preserve that which is already
established
 We maintain our existing knowledge,
beliefs, attitudes and stereotypes
 Confirmation bias
 Hindsight bias

Attribution Biases
Three general biases we use when we
are interpreting and explaining the
world
 Fundamental Attribution Error
 Actor Observer Bias
 Self Biases

Fundamental attribution error

The tendency to overestimate the
importance of personality factors
rather than situational factors when
describing and explaining the causes
of social behavior
Actor-observer bias

The tendency for actors to attribute
their actions to situational factors
while observers attribute the same
actions to personality factors
Self Biases - Egocentric
thought
The tendency to perceive ourselves
as more central to events than is
actually the case
 We tend to think we influence events
and people more than we do

Self-serving bias

The tendency to make dispositional
(personality) attributions for our
successes and to make situational
attributions for our failures